Sunk In Helsinki: NATO After The Summit

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While Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin both proclaimed
victory in their recent Helsinki summit, the NATO alliance may have
been the loser. In fact, the future of NATO as the military
alliance through which the United States protects its vital
interests in Europe was greatly undermined by the Helsinki summit.
U.S. negotiators made three major errors that needlessly weakened
American and NATO security.

President Clinton wasted an opportunity to re-assert the
identity of NATO as a U.S.-led military alliance of collective
defense. This was an ideal opportunity to explain why NATO is
important to the United States and Europe, why the United States
will stay involved as NATO's leader, and why enlargement forms a
critical part of that vision. Instead, the Administration
negotiators accepted the Russian view of NATO's evolution into an
all-encompassing and largely emasculated collective security
grouping that will be dedicated increasingly to peacekeeping and
other smaller military operations.

The Administration offered ambiguously worded promises about
Russia's consultative role in the "new" NATO. Three new initiatives
would give Russia a voice in NATO decision making that would put
Moscow in a position to disrupt and dilute the rapid
consensus-building that has made NATO history's most durable
alliance.

The Clinton team offered a series of concessions on five
separate arms control agreements.

Defining NATO The United States is involved in European security as NATO's
leader mainly to ensure that Europe's freedom is not threatened by
a major power or bloc of hostile powers. With no major power poised
to threaten Europe, the United States has reduced its
European-based forces from over 344,000 in 1990 to around 100,000
in 1997. The temporary absence of a clear and present threat,
however, does not remove the enduring nature of the vital U.S.
interest in Europe. The U.S. commitment to European security
through NATO should be thought of as insurance against future
threats. The enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and
the Czech Republic is part of the profound U.S. commitment to the
defense of Western and Central Europe. The United States is
enlarging NATO to enhance the mission of defending vital interests
in Europe, at the same time bringing security to an area of Europe
long wracked by war and brutal conquest.

Unfortunately, none of this was made clear by President Clinton
during the summit. The Administration team apparently thought that
an enlargement in size must necessarily be accompanied by an
enlargement in the scope and activity of NATO--transforming it from
a focused and cohesive alliance of collective defense to a large,
diffuse alliance of collective security. Turning NATO into a
watered-down "talk shop" was long a Soviet ambition during the Cold
War, during which on at least three occasions in the 1950s and
1960s Soviet diplomats called for NATO and the Warsaw Pact to be
replaced by a pan-European system of collective security. Russian
negotiators at Helsinki in 1997, with similar geopolitical goals,
found the Clinton Administration a willing partner in trying to
"Findlandize" NATO for the future.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright articulated the
Administration's vision of NATO that would put the Alliance on the
road to recreation as a political grouping not dissimilar to the
quintessential collective security association: the 50-plus member
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Briefing the press in Helsinki, Secretary Albright strongly
insisted that the process of NATO enlargement was "not going to be
part of creating any new artificial dividing lines in Europe." This
view represents a colossal misunderstanding of NATO. A military
alliance entails a solemn commitment to defend the territory of
member states. The obligation of NATO members to defend other
members from attack is all about "lines" between states. Without a
territorial demarcation of NATO's membership, the defense guarantee
established by Article V of the NATO treaty is a sham. Far from
being "artificial," the lines of NATO's membership are the absolute
core of the Alliance. The desire to rid Europe of these
distinctions is clear evidence that the Administration's support of
enlargement rests on the hopes that NATO will transform itself into
a slightly improved OSCE.

The Russian Role in a "New" NATO To advance this transformation, the Administration proposed
that Russia be given a greater role in NATO's decision-making
process. Clinton proposed a non-binding charter between Russia and
NATO that would spell out the relationship between an enlarged
NATO, Russia, and the "have-not" states in-between the two. The
idea of a charter is not necessarily a bad one, but the Clinton
Administration's proposals to add an Atlantic Partnership Council
and a NATO-Russia Joint Council at NATO headquarters will ensure
that an already highly bureaucratized NATO cannot act with the
consensus and cohesion that have made it so successful in the past.
Such a role for Russia in NATO will make it possible for a decision
taken by one NATO council in the morning to be watered-down,
confused, or stalled in different afternoon councils by a Russia
that does not accept the legitimacy of the alliance. Moreover, the
proposed formation of a permanent joint NATO-Russia peacekeeping
brigade, which has worked well in Bosnia as an ad-hoc creation, is
further evidence of what Henry Kissinger called the "Helsinki
blueprint [that] moves NATO from being an alliance toward a system
of collective security."

Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that President Clinton went into
the summit with the goal of paying Russia "to pretend that NATO
expansion is something other than what it is." Unfortunately, the
Administration apparently believes that NATO should be something
different than what it really is. It believes NATO enlargement is
ultimately about expanding a club of democratic, free market states
that will cooperate in the future on peacekeeping and small
missions. These, however, are not the alpha and omega of NATO; they
are the byproducts of a stable Europe whose freedom is guaranteed
by a credible, focused, and cohesive military alliance of
collective defense. Ultimately, NATO is about undertaking a serious
commitment to the territorial defense of a member state. The only
way to ensure the democratic prosperity of Europe is to be
forthright about this U.S. commitment in the first place.

Not only has the Administration sold a new and enlarged NATO to
Russia in the guise of a weak collective security group, it has
ensured that Russia will have a powerful voice in NATO's inner
councils to make sure this is what NATO becomes. Before concluding
any agreements with Russia on its relationship to or role in NATO,
the Clinton Administration should be forthright about the purpose
of an enlarged NATO. It is not to create a new diplomatic or
quasi-military association dedicated to peacekeeping or other small
missions. Rather, NATO represents a military commitment to the
collective defense of Western and Central Europe that cannot be
credibly maintained if Russia--a country opposed to the very
legitimacy of the alliance--is given such a strong voice in
determining the future direction of NATO.